In 1924, the year she began studying at the Bauhaus in Weimar and produced the first in a series of metal items that launched her pioneering industrial design career, German artist Marianne Brandt also made two abstract collages and took her first documentary photographs. These works marked the beginning of a visual practice that the artist pursued for at least a decade. Between 1924 and 1932, Brandt made about fifty collages that she alternately referred to as Montagen or Photomontagen. Each is a neutrally coloured panel on which the artist has assembled a blend of black-and-white, sepia, and colour newspaper and magazine cuttings. All feature female figures that depict the key traits of the German feminist movement known as Neue Frau (New Woman). A group of photos showing Brandt in her studio, her image reflected by the objects she has designed, reveals her allegiance to this new spirit with a look that is both feminine and masculine, her delicate features made androgynous by a Bubikopf (short-cropped) haircut. The image she presents in Selbstporträt mit Schmuck (1929) seems like a perfect manifesto of this new generation, and her body, more armoured than bejewelled, proclaims its right to be consciously displayed.
Stefano Mudu
